The Maze at Windermere

"A richly layered novel of love, ambition, and duplicity, set against the storied seascape of Newport, Rhode Island A reckless wager between a tennis pro with a fading career and a drunken party guest--the stakes are an antique motorcycle and an heiress's diamond necklace--launches a narrative odyssey that braids together three centuries of aspiration and adversity. A witty and urbane bachelor of the Gilded Age embarks on a high-risk scheme to marry into a fortune; a young writer soon to make his mark turns himself to his craft with harrowing social consequences; an aristocratic British officer during the American Revolution carries on a courtship that leads to murder; and, in Newport's earliest days, a tragically orphaned Quaker girl imagines a way forward for herself and the slave girl she has inherited. In The Maze at Windermere Gregory Blake Smith weaves these intersecting worlds into a brilliant tapestry, charting a voyage across the ages into the maze of the human heart"-- Provided by publisher.

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This is a fabulous story. There are 5 time threads woven throughout the book, all involving one stately 'cottage' on the seacoast of Newport, RI. Each one is engrossing, riveting. Each one defines a set of mores peculiar to an era, and a set of personality types involved in that era, each of those 'characters' seem to appear in various guises throughout those 5 eras. I had just finished "Peculiar Ground" by Lucy Hughes-Hallet. She employs a simpler, but similar weaving of time threads, but much, much less successfully.

Traveling between 2011 and 1692 is shocking. The purity of thought and experience that was possible in the 1600's is just gone now, without perhaps being in the Arctic or Antarctic.